Vivian O'Dell | USLHC | USA

Look, ma…

I occasionally try to convince my decidedly non-academic family that scientists are in fact a subset of humanity, and not a pocket universe unto ourselves. Hey, we even have “vertical integration” meetings!

That’s an interesting question, Dominic — sometimes it feels like experimental physics projects last an entire lifetime! It’s definitely not like what our theory colleagues do when they publish papers every few months…

I believe the LHC is intended to run for more than 5 years before the detectors and machine are upgraded, i.e. the SLHC (Super-LHC) upgrades at around 2015. Actually we are “forced” to install new components also because the current ones won’t last forever with all these high energy particles bombarding them. The SLHC research is already going on right now; it is quite standard in this field to start designing the next detector when the current one has yet to produce a substantial amount of data.

I am actually starting to join the SLHC R&D effort too. It is very neat to play around with designs that may decide some part of what a next generation of experiments can measure. 🙂